Lazy developers use branch names to keep track of their tickets

lazy-developer-branch-tickets.md

On my team we like to put ticket numbers in commit messages, so that Jira finds them and puts links to the commits in the ticket. The problem is that I have a really hard time remembering my ticket numbers. What I've been doing is creating a branch for each ticket, but while that helps me remember the numbers, it still doesn't help me remember which ticket is which. I had tried posting comments to myself in Slack to keep track of them, but then it occurred to me that I didn't need to be using just the ticket number as the branch name, so now I'm trying something new.

Instead of creating branches with just the ticket number, I'm using ticket/short-description. The length of the branch name doesn't affect much, thanks to tab completion, and having that information available at a glance right in the repo is huge, especially since I have the branch name as part of my prompt.

[me@my-machine:dir PROJ-1234/fix-ci ]$ git branch
  PROJ-1234/fix-ci
  PROJ-1233/remove-stupid-widgets
  PROJ-1232/fix-broken-widgets
  PROJ-1231/add-awesome-widgets

Could I get any lazier? You bet I can! Drop this into your repo in .git/hooks/commit-msg (make sure it's executable):

#!/bin/bash

# Change this to match the format that your tickets are in
TICKET_RE="PROJ-[0-9]+"

FILE="$1"
BRANCH="$(git symbolic-ref --short HEAD)"
BRANCH="${BRANCH%%/*}"

# If the branch name looks like a ticket number, then we make sure the
# message starts with the ticket number
if [[ $BRANCH =~ ^${TICKET_RE}$ ]]; then
  MSG="$(head -1 "$FILE")"
  if ! [[ $MSG =~ ${BRANCH}* ]]; then
    sed -i.bak -e "1s/^/$BRANCH - /" "$FILE"
  fi
fi

Now whenver I commit from a branch that has a ticket-number name but forget to start my commit message with the ticket number, git will add it for me.

nice! this pre-commit hook does pretty much the same thing if you use pre-commit. https://github.com/milin/giticket#features